How will NFL fans be watching games and consuming the league's product three years from now? Five? 10?

It's Hans Schroeder’s job to try and find the answer.

"My own personal view is that I think we have to think of this in two ways: What's out there in the next 12-to-24 months and what stuff is really hanging on the horizon five years out or more,” the NFL's Senior Vice President of Media Revenue, Strategy and Development told Sporting News. "There are going to be drastic changes."

Schroeder discussed what direction technologically in the league is headed, the current state of television ratings and other related topics in this question-and-answer session.

SN: Television ratings aren’t quite back to where they were in recent seasons, but there has been a rebound since the presidential election ended. What is that attributable to?

Schroeder: Probably a handful of things. If you go back to every year there's been an election dating back to 1996, the ratings tend to be down. We can all agree that this election wasn’t like any we had ever seen before. It pulled people in and they were much more engaged than certainly any other year.

Other things also come into play like the competiveness of the games. I think we had some transition as we said goodbye to some stars from yesterday. We were missing some stars in the early part of the year. And new stars that have energized us like Dak Prescott and Zeke Elliott were still emerging as Peyton (Manning) exited. Certainly, we're encouraged and excited to see the (ratings) rebound in the past five weeks. As you’ve seen over time, our viewership has continued to grow over the past decade while other parts of television haven't. We're pretty optimistic we’ll see that growth in the future going forward.

SN: What are the challenges in accounting for technological changes and the ever-changing consumption of product while balancing those avenues with what is the backbone of NFL revenue — the league’s television contracts?

Schroeder: We're fortunate in a couple ways. One is that sports are still so much of a live viewing and communal experience. Our games are played predominantly on Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays. It's a great opportunity to get together with friends and family and watch on the couch if you’re not going to the game, which is still the best way to experience it.

That said, more of our fans are wanting to watch on more screens. We want to continue to evolve our business and put the content in more places with more ways to reach it. For example, we have a great relationship with Verizon for the mobile distribution of live games. We took another step forward showing games on Twitter for Thursday Night Football. In addition, we just started streaming our games through CBS All Access (a $6 monthly subscription service).

The thing I like is that we don't want to stand still. We continue to move forward as we see the landscape evolving. We want to make sure our games are accessible to fans wherever they want to watch it and however they want to experience it. If I want to watch on my phone, I can do that. On my tablet? I can do that. We take a lot of time also making sure our existing partners are really strong and successful by continuing to look on the horizon and evolve the business in a fan-friendly way with the best access to games we can have.

SN: How well have the Thursday night games done viewership-wise on Twitter?

Schroeder: We look at them two-fold and want to be very transparent as to how we do this. We're looking at it from reach — how many are coming in to watch at any point in time throughout the game and how many are new people. We've reached about two-to-three million people through the twitter platform who have come in and watched at least some part of the game. We think some of them watch on Twitter and then watch on television.

There are about 300,000 to 400,000 people watching each week on Twitter at any point in time. If we’re averaging 15 million to 17 million viewers, you can add two-to-three percent on top of that through digital streams. We think that number will continue to grow. We’ve learned a lot from the Twitter partnership.

SN: The NFL had an internet-only game in 2015 with Buffalo vs. Jacksonville from London. What if any plans are there for a future telecast like that?

Schroeder: We did that with Yahoo!, and it was a great experience. They were a great partner. You could not only take that game with you anywhere in the U.S. but globally except for Canada (because of Canadian television rights). It was a neat initiative for us. I think it was a step along the way that led to us doing even more things like the Thursday night Twitter initiative.

As we look forward, we’re going to continue to innovate and explore and push the boundary a little bit so that the fans are going to be engaged ... We have a lot of different options.

SN: Some fans complain that there is too much football and have been critical of the Thursday night games. What are some things the NFL could do to make Thursday night football more attractive?

Schroeder: We’re always looking at things from the entirety of what we can do. Unfortunately, the early part of the season featured some games that may have looked like great matchups but didn’t end up being great games competitively speaking because one team got the jump on the other. But looking back the past two weeks, Minnesota-Dallas did a great viewership number (a Thursday-night record 21.8 million viewers). Last week, we had a really good game between Kansas City and Oakland. The Raider Nation has come back and the viewership came with it (at 17.4 million viewers).

I think fans love Thursday night football as a way to start their weekend so we’re excited about it and its growth.

Broncos fans watch NFL football from the back of their car in 2015. (Getty Images)

SN: What are some ways in which pacing of games can be picked up, and how much is there a concern that the length of contests affects viewership, especially with what would seem a lack of attention span compared to previous generations of viewers?

Schroeder: You hear me say the words, "Evolve, innovate and grow." But they’re not just words. From the commissioner on down, our hyper-focus is continuing to make the game better. We think the game is great as it is. The Dallas-Pittsburgh game (in Week 10), I think fans could have watched that one for another hour. But I also think the game itself is changing in the way it's being played in terms of its speed. You do see a lot more no-huddle (offense).

A lot of what we want to do is continue to make sure the overall game presentation for the fans at the stadium and at home is the best it can be. We're looking for ways to innovate and change through ways like maybe putting one stoppage in here or pulling one out there. We want to continue figuring out how to do things better.

SN: What are some initiatives on the horizon from a technical standpoint that the NFL is working on?

Schroeder: We're continuing to innovate with new formats like VR (virtual reality). We recently announced a partnership with Google and think that’s something we’re going to continue to focus on. We've got our Next Gen Stats platform with player tracking data. We’ve got a chip in the ball for the same kind of thing on Thursday night football. We're hopefully going to continue to unlock a whole different element of how fans see our game and engage in our sport in a pretty innovative way.

And we’re going to continue to work with different platforms and with the clubs themselves and try to evolve a tight set of content. Ultimately, people are fans of clubs first. We need to make sure the teams have the most engaging platform they possibly can.

SN: Finally, why do you think the NFL is well-heeled to remain the leader in television ratings and popularity among sports in the U.S.?

Schroeder: We're going to continue to make sure our games are very broadly distributed and try to engage fans while developing new fans. We look at the general media model where our games are over-air in every home market and broadly distributed.

Combine that with great work at the club level developing and building fans and our constant work to be better. We have a formula that allows us to continue to be successful, but we don’t it take lightly. We work hard at it and that’s going to continue.